Comments on XForms 2.0 Working Draft 7 August 2012

Dear all,

W3C's SOAPAttach defines a standard way to associate a SOAP message with
one or more attachments in a multipart MIME structure for transport.
 OASIS's ebMS specification extends SOAPAttach, defining ebXML-specific
extensions for the SOAP envelope (first MIME part) and specifying that
application payload should appear in subsequent MIME parts.

There remain (from the XForms 1.0 and 1.1 specifications) two issues that
frustrate XForms clients from submitting instance data as SOAPAttach
attachments (and therefore as ebMS messages):

Firstly, section 7.10.3 (SOAP HTTP Binding) states that "The method
attribute of the submission must be set to get or post in order to access
the SOAP HTTP binding".  Whilst this is not fatal (as one could generate a
SOAP message through scripting), it would be a considerable improvement if
one could simply specify the "multipart-post" method to access a SOAPAttach
binding.

But more importantly, section 7.9.5.2 (Serialization as multipart/related)
expresses that subsequent MIME parts exist "for each node with a datatype
of xsd:anyURI populated by upload".  This precludes submitting form
instance data itself anywhere other than the first MIME part, which
SOAPAttach reserves for the SOAP envelope.  If one wishes to submit
instance data as a SOAPAttach attachment, e.g. to be ebMS application
payload, one must serialise the entire message manually - defeating many of
the benefits of using XForms!

I don't know whether such use case is within scope for this specification,
but I imagine it ought to be.  I also don't know whether it is now too late
to incorporate this feedback into the work on v2.0, but I'd appreciate any
thoughts/comments/consideration that you can give.

Kind regards,
-- Alan